The Art Life: On Creativity and Career is a collection of solicited and selected texts that address the philosophical and practical issues that affect art-making and the marketplace. It brings together visual artists, curators, dealers, writers, musicians, architects, actors, and educators, who speak to their internal motivations, influences and processes, and to their external engagements with community, audience, career and success. Many of the contributors have taken part in exhibitions and public programs at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center from 2007 to the present, and others have been included to represent provocative historical and contemporary viewpoints by a range of influential figures. The texts are taken from lectures, interviews, published statements, websites and email exchanges, and are joined by images of artists in the midst of creating or installing, as well as completed art works. The analytic and inspirational entries address the fact that a life in the arts can be simultaneously rewarding, frustrating, doubt-filled, joyful and uncertain. And yet, thousands of artists persist every day, motivated by a private insistency and the promise of satisfaction and recognition. Each is attempting to combine their creative life with a thriving career, and this publication provides various “words of wisdom” which can serve to inspire, challenge and reassure them. As painter Franz Kline said, “The real thing about creating is to have the capacity to be embarrassed.” The composite nature of The Art Life is meant to posit that each creative individual must find the necessary information and materials to best establish their unique voice. The book is as much found as written, a heady mix of opinions and questions that can be used in classrooms and studios by artists of all ages.

Remapping social and cultural territories, Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller (born 1966) has alternately taken on the roles of artistic producer, publisher, film-maker, collaborator, curator, parade organizer and cultural archivist. Over the past two decades, he has been a pioneering and highly influential figure in contemporary art, helping to rewrite the rules of artistic practice with his extraordinary collaborative interventions, which have included parades, battle re-enactments and exhibitions of folk art. This comprehensive catalogue is published for Deller’s first major survey exhibition. Employing a wealth of ephemera, critical writing and documentary and artwork photography, this beautiful book is the first and only complete survey of the artist’s multifaceted practice.

Published by Four Corners Books.Introduction by Michael Patterson-Carver. Text by Harrell Fletcher, Matthew Higgs.

Self-taught artist Michael Patterson-Carver's drawings celebrate ordinary men and women working for change through direct action and demonstrations. This is the first monograph on the artist, edited by artist Harrell Fletcher and including a conversation between Fletcher and an essay by White Columns Director Matthew Higgs.

1990–1995, Improbable History

Published by JRP|Ringier.Edited by Paul Ha. Text by Dominic Molon, Matthew Higgs.

Through media as various as paintings, diaristic calendars and performative videos, New York-based artist Sean Landers (born 1962) articulates his personal self-doubts and humiliations, attempting a sincere and unflinching excavation of the artist's consciousness. Landers foregrounds the artist's personality as an object worthy of study, and in his relentless articulation of emotion, at its most base and its most noble--from self-loathing to empathy and love--he reconceives and renews this persona. This volume, and the exhibition it accompanies at the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, takes the years between 1990 and 1995 as Landers' formative and decisive period, and examines the conceits that he has cultivated over the course of his 20-year career, from the early yellow legal pads featuring the fictional artist Chris Hamson as autobiographer to the reclaiming of the persona by Landers' own voice.

Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg

Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg have been collecting contemporary art for more than 25 years; their collection features major works by artists including Kai Althoff, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, David Hammons, Mary Heilmann and many others.

This expanded edition of Gregory R. Miller's hugely successful first-ever monograph on Marilyn Minter from 2007 brings her public up to speed with the inclusion of works created over the past three years, including images from Minter's 2009 video “Green Pink Caviar,” shown in New York's Times Square and featured in Madonna's recent Sticky and Sweet concert tour. Minter's ever-expanding reputation was established during the 1980s, when her work engaged formal aspects of painting as well as subject matter that remain central to her practice today. This publication features work from every period of a career that now spans over 40 years, and reproduces in full color nearly every painting Minter has made, along with a wide selection of her painterly photographs of the last several years. It also includes the seminal and haunting Coral Ridge Towers series of black-and-white photos that Minter took of her mother in 1969. Art historian Johanna Burton contributes a substantial essay that analyzes and elucidates all aspects of Minter's work; her text is complemented by a lengthy conversation between Minter and her friend, painter Mary Heilmann, as well as by “Twenty Questions,” a project assembled by Matthew Higgs to which a wide range of artists, curators, friends and others with a unique connection to Minter have contributed. The design and production of this expanded edition have been superbly realized by the award-winning New York- and Amsterdam-based design studio, COMA. This monograph firmly establishes Minter's important and central position in contemporary art.

Published by JRP|Ringier.Edited by Lionel Bovier. Text by Kathy Grayson, Matthew Higgs.

Michael Cline (born 1973) is a contemporary fabulist, describing an almost hellish version of the American Dream in which the streets are not paved with gold but littered with vagrants, violence and the remnants of whatever social contract may once have existed, all executed in soothing pastel tones and children's illustration-style drawing. This is the first monograph on the New York-based artist.

Published by Bortolami Gallery, New York.Contributions by Matthew Higgs, Shamim Momin.

Born 1972, New York-based Canadian artist Bozidar Brazda is known for his multimedia installations that mix sculpture, video, music and painting to convey larger narratives. His work for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, involved fake radio programs, spliced sequences of songs, interviews, recordings of friends and family and scripted narration that alternated with advertisements for fictive goods and services. Stacks of commercially packaged CDs of the recording provided a nonprecious, takeaway sculptural element. Other works have involved a fake, dead parachutist on a New York City rooftop, upended tables and painted televisions. This introductory volume features work from 2003 to 2007, alongside 20 questions collected from other artists by Matthew Higgs and an interview with Shamim Momin in which Brazda describes his work: "I guess performance is one way that I've discovered to be a little more spontaneous. You don't necessarily have to wait around for a gallery or a museum to invite you, you can just email your friends an invite and 'perform.' This is how it started for me, as a kind of dinner party with an art slant. A way to socialize and make art at the same time."

The exquisite paintings of record covers and spines by Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller give us a glimpse into his cultural identity. I Like Your Music I Love Your Music presents a selection of recent works dealing with the ways in which we construct our cultural identities through music--which he represents as a network of aesthetic, social and personal exchanges. Muller's multifaceted practice includes curating, cultural agitating, DJing and record collecting--his collection tops out at 15,000 digital albums. He is particularly well known for his multitextured installations that blend his own sound tracks with his visual work. He is represented by Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This volume is published in collaboration with Spain's Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), and includes an essay by artist and Director of New York's White Columns, Matthew Higgs.

Photographs 1990-1890

Published by Charta/Irish Museum of Modern Art.Text by Enrique Juncosa, Séan Kissane, Matthew Higgs.

People thought we were just Victorian queens who wanted to make little kitten paintings on pillows and be kitschy, quipped Peter McGough, one half of the collaborative duo McDermott & McGough, as he reminisced about the East Village art scene in the 1980s--where the artists met and honed their inimitable style--in a 2003 Artforum interview with Bob Nickas. The artists have since become known for their performative fusion of art and life--namely dressing like Victorian dandies 24 hours a day and embracing archaic photographic techniques such as palladium, gum, salt and cyanotype printing. They are not escapists, however, as Roberta Smith has pointed out. "The allusions to turn-of-the-century dandyism are combined with often explicit references to homoeroticism and to the artists' own sexuality. The implication is that the moral hypocrisies of the Victorian era are still in effect today." Featuring more than 120 images, this volume, released on the occasion of McDermott & McGough's retrospective exhibition at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin examines two decades worth of the team's photographic work and includes texts by Matthew Higgs, Director of White Columns in New York, and Séan Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions at The IMMA, Dublin.

A Century of CCA

Published by California College of the Arts.

This volume presents a vivid portrait of the Bay Area art scene over the past century. More than 100 color illustrations of work by a wide range of artists are featured, including the renegade plein-air painters Society of Six, production ceramist Edith Heath, Bay Area figurative painter Richard Diebenkorn, studio ceramist Peter Voulkos, Minimalist John McCracken, conceptualist Dennis Oppenheim, photorealist Robert Bechtle and cultural commentator Squeak Carnwath. The book is further enriched by a contemporary section dedicated to work produced in the last 20 years by Kota Ezawa, Larry Sultan and Liz Cohen, among others. Published in celebration of the centennial anniversary of the California College of the Arts, the book accompanies an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. It includes artist biographies, essays by Nancy Boas, Glen Helfand, Tara McDowell and Peter Selz and texts by critic Arthur C. Danto and curator Matthew Higgs, among others.

This long-overdue volume highlights a selection of writings and artists' projects from Real Life magazine, a seminal 1980s periodical edited by the artist, writer and curator Thomas Lawson and writer Susan Morgan. Published in 23 intermittent black-and-white issues from 1979-1994, Real Life was devoted to providing an outlet for a circle of artists who did not feel properly represented in the mainstream art world at the time--many of whom are now grouped with the Pictures and Post-Pictures artists. The anthology features both artists and art historians writing on art, media and popular culture--oftentimes infusing a new kind of humor into their cultural critiques--as well as original pictorial contributions. It includes writings by and about Eric Bogosian, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Thomas Lawson, Allan McCollum, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Richard Prince, David Robbins, Michael Smith, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner, to name a few, as well as visual projects by Sherrie Levine, James Welling, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Group Material, among others.

Marilyn Minter is the first book published about the work of the highly respected and influential contemporary artist Marilyn Minter. This retrospective publication features work from every period of Minter's career spanning nearly forty years. Minter is considered one of today's most important artists. Her perennially expanding reputation was widely established during the 1980s, when her work engaged formal aspects of painting as well as subject matter that remain central to her practice today. This comprehensive book reproduces in full color nearly every painting Minter has made along with a wide selection of her painterly photographs of the last several years. The book also includes the seminal and haunting Coral Ridge Towers series of black-and-white photos Minter took of her mother in 1969. Art historian Johanna Burton contributes a substantial essay that analyzes and elucidates all aspects of Minter's work. Burton's text is complemented by a lengthy "conversation" between Minter and painter and friend Mary Heilmann, as well as by "Twenty Questions," a project assembled by Matthew Higgs and posed by a wide range of artists, curators, friends and others with a unique connection to Minter. The book's concept, design, and production have been vividly realized by the award-winning New York- and Amsterdam-based design studio, COMA. This publication-with its combination of beautiful reproductions of Minter's work, Burton's powerfully argued essay, and revealing interviews-firmly establishes Minter's important and central position in contemporary art history.

Bells and whistles beware, there's a new noisemaker in town: Oliver Payne and Nick Relph's new book--which is jacketed in the durable, stain-resistant patterned fabric of London Underground seat upholstery--rings like a cell phone when it is opened. In this fuzzy tome, published on the occasion of the artists' exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Payne and Relph offer the first print transcripts of their 2004 films Driftwood, Gentlemen and Comma, Pregnant Pause, as well as their notes on 2005's Sonic the Warhol, which they call their most successful work because "The last album is always the best album." Their own writing is intermixed with pieces from a whole crowd of authors addressing topics that have inspired them and their work, including Matthias Connor on Scottish glam-rock; Tim Nash on riding the bus in London; and Ian Svenonius on the political history of drinking. An unconventional interview conducted by coordinating questions for the artists from 20 different individuals also appears, along with essays by Scott Portnoy and Rochelle Steiner, the Chief Curator at the Serpentine Gallery.

This post-Pop scatter artist's seminal installation Celebration? Real Life has seen a lot of attention in recent years, and most recently been literally revisited--revised and re-installed--in London, Zurich, and Dijon. The 1972 original and the revivals are all here, in plans, drawings, invitations, and photographs, presented as both reflections of the time in which they were first conceived and important references for a younger generation.

In the summer of 1973, artist Gordon Matta-Clark discovered that the city of New York occasionally auctioned improbably tiny and frequently inaccessible parcels of land created by zoning eccentricities. Fascinated by these spaces, he bought 15 of them (14 in Queens, and one in Staten Island) for between $25 and $75 each, photographed them and collated the photographs with the appropriate deeds and maps. He called the project Fake Estates. Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's “Fake Estates” further documents and advances this seminal work, and accompanies Cabinet magazine's exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns in New York. Included here are responses to Matta-Clark's original artwork by 20 contemporary artists including Francis Al˙s, Jimbo Blachly, Mark Dion, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dan Price and Mierle Ukeles. Odd Lots also provides the definitive Fake Estates history, thus adding new dimension to the scholarship on this important artist*all within the spirit of collaboration and experimentation that marked Matta-Clark's short but influential career.

Published by CCA Wattis/ICI, NY.Essays by Matthew Higgs, Kevin Killian, and David Robbins. Foreword by Judith Richards and Ralph Rugoff.

Over 40 years ago, Andy Warhol promoted the concept that artists are celebrities, just as worthy of portrayal as other cultural icons. Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists begins where Warhol left off. Presenting visually striking and conceptually diverse works in a range of mediums, Likeness is the first exhibition and catalogue to propose a recent history of artists' representations of other artists--of friends, peers, and idols. While any portrait is both a document and a personal record of the relationship between the artist and his or her subject, blurring distinctions between public and private, portraits of artists further enrich the situation; they commemorate and concretize the intimate social dramas of the art world and the economies of exchange. Selected here are over 50 paintings, drawings, photographs, and works in other media, created by a loose network of artists primarily active in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin during the past three decades. Included are works by David Armstrong, AA Bronson, Bruce La Bruce, Chuck Close, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Hamilton, Mike Kelley, Sean Landers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Misrach, Dave Muller, Paul Noble, Julian Opie, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, and others.